Monthly Archives: October 2012

This is a rather shabby video taken with my iPad and posted directly from it. Of course I forgot to strip the audio track with the aquarium in the background but I doubt I can do that when posing directly to youtube from the from the iPad. Perhaps that provides it with some authenticity. No polished computer graphics here 😉

Now, after I have looked at the YouTube video myself I must say that the quality of the video on my iPad while still not great, is a lot better than the YouTube video. The Youtube conversion adds quite an amount of compression artifacts. When looking at the video even on the iPad it is quite clear, however, that there is some interference between the PWM control that fades the LEDs and the recording frequency of the image sensor in the iPad. Also, of course the camera software dynamically adjust the white point etc.

In combination of all these effect the video looks a little choppy. In person the fading effect is very smooth!

Last Friday was a memorable day as it marks the one year anniversary of Steve Job’s passing. This did not occur to me until Saturday, when I finally decided, after having clicked past it several times, to see why my home page (which usually brings me to the Apple site) was different this time.
Of course it was still the Apple home page, however, it was temporarily changed to play a video with some of Steve Job’s memorable moments.

So I decided to slightly change my weekend plans and have a little creative fun with the Apple logo and use it in one of my lighting systems and decided to make a little concept rendering. Modeled in Blender and rendered with Indigo Renderer.

Some time in the summer of 2011I started developing and building the LED lighting systems that will the main subject of this blog.
I use a host of software tools to develop these. For the mechanical parts of these systems I use Alibre Design Pro and Eagle for PCB development. Not enough good can be said about the wonderful open source hard and software world of Arduino embedded microcontrollers. Without these this would not have been possible. To visualize my ideas before I build an actual prototype the open software 3D graphics suite Blender and the unbiased render engine Indigo Renderer have proven to be invaluable. The banner on the front page for example is not a photograph but a computer generated rendering.

Now, having just said that, someone could just suspect that all the imagery on this blog is computer generated, so here is a real photo of the LED lighting system shown in the banner graphics. I took the photo with my iPad just before I sat down to write this first blog. The photo is amateurish enough that there is no mistaking it is a photo of the real thing 😉